N O M A Gallery Projects is proud to present the first artist in "the videoho0le project", Ranu Mukherjee. The program consists of three video works played on a loop.

The video works on this loop each have their guiding figures; the black hole, the wilderness and non-sites, and the nomadic respectively. They are ‘fake’ films, in the sense that they are made mostly from still images and animation composed to give them filmic flow. They address the expectation of event by suggesting occurrences taking place on a geo-physical time scale; events that can be perceived but whose edges we are unable to see. I am trying to give video a kind of objecthood and to make a connection between painting and screen based pictorial space through the induction of tactile imagination, as occurs for instance when viewing paintings on a screen. Mark-making is translated as the accumulation of socio-cultural patterns and collage becomes a way of thinking about edges, pointing to what happens where things meet.

Black Hole is a sequenced tableau depicting various objects stranded on a street corner, from which emanate an abstract event. The event takes form in a hazy pulsing glow and a moving black shape, which oozes from under the objects like a viscous liquid, which oozes from under the objects like a viscous liquid, forming patterns and occasional representational images. The work attempts to depict a historical moment in which our relationship to mass-produced artifacts becomes metaphysical.

The title for A Wilderness of Elsewhere’s, colony 1, 03.09 is borrowed from the 1971 essay by Robert Smithson, “A Cinematic Atopia”, i wich he described his ‘memory becoming a wilderness of elsewheres’ as he attempted to remember any film he might love or hate. He was met with an infinity of non-specific cinematic imagery, without narratives or character: the ultimate non-site. In relating the contemporary screen, with its multiplicity of function as window, mirror, portal and page, to the notion of the black mirror as a predictive device, this physiological wilderness is inhabited by the blending of first and third world materialities common to contemporary experience. In this two channel video work a sequence of tundra landscapes are populated and de-populated by sculptural collages of architecture and fashion, cut and scanned from contemporary print publications. The screens share a soundscape, made from a wide variety of samples including glaciers melting and rocket launches, composed into a sonic ‘event’.

Sketch for a Nomad Cityscape is a hybrid animation, built from video segments of my garden and scanned and sampled images of nomadic dwellings, both contemporary and historical, sets up a series of contradictions; setting the garden- an image of home, as the ground for a living in motion and simultaneously becoming “city”, and collapsing temporalities and scales to infer miscegenation of archaic and contemporary technologies inherent in the nomadic ideal.